GURPS Marvels Introduction

 Last summer, I had an extended stay in the hospital. Luckily, this stay coincided with Bundle of Holding's GURPS essentials offering, so I grabbed PDFs of the GURPS Basic Set. To give me something to do, I started writing up GURPS versions of Marvel Superheroes. I did more than a few of these back in the days of 3rd edition, but those files have been lost to time.

So that was fun, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed building super characters with GURPS. After my release, I set things aside until a few months back, when I began putting together seeds for what became my currently running (though sporadic) Dungeon Fantasy campaign. I used the GURPS Character Sheet program to make the PCs and monsters for that game, and as I got more familiar with the ins-and-outs of GCS, I started thinking back on those Marvel characters again.

When I read the Pyramid article "Knowing Your Own ST" and saw that GCS supported those rules, that clinched it for me.

So here we come to GURPS Marvels. It's a look at the Marvel Universe circa November 1966, 5 years to the month the Fantastic Four took off on their fated rocket ship journey. It's the GURPS Sourcebook I would wish into being if I ever found a genie in a lamp.

Characters built for GURPS Marvels use the lifting and damage progression from "Knowing Your Own ST." Numbers and other data are pulled from The Gamer's Handbook to the Marvel Universe (mainly), The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe (Deluxe Edition), and on occasion, my own cursory reading of the character's first few adventures (at least up through late 1966).

I've given some characters typical 'adventuring' skills like First Aid, Shadowing, or Stealth to help round them out a little bit, as their skills and abilities might have been a bit undercooked in the comics at the time (*cough*Invisible Girl*cough*).

I then discovered that I still had a blogger account (hello, 2010!), and that I could output my GCS files in a format that was pleasing to my eye (drawing from Dungeon Fantasy's standard monster format and the format Douglas Cole used in his Nordland Bestiary). So now I can inflict my work on the world.

The characters won't be posted in any sort of order, though they will all be tagged so finding all of the Avengers (once they go up) won't be difficult. Eventually there will be an index page.

I don't consider these writeups to be definitive. They're meant mostly as a sort of 'platonic ideal' of the character as they were depicted in the comics at the time. I know I may have missed a few things. Or maybe I've included something that wouldn't be a part of the character until much later. Likewise, I'm not fishing for points or trying to get the most bang for the buck. I just want to make sure the character feels and plays right. 

Above all, however, is that this is a learning process for me. My earlier writeups will no doubt be blunter and less elegant than those that come later.

If the math is wrong, however, blame GCS.